Future Students

Whether you’re a high school student, graduate student, international student, nontraditional student or military service member, now’s your chance to discover CMU and put your stamp on the world. More...

The conference is free and open to CMU faculty, graduate and undergraduate students. The conference is focused on providing faculty with evidence-based best-practices and tools.Registration is required for this event.

Discussion with Academic Senate Leaders on Prioritizing Academics at CMU

About the TLC and Stanley Fish

The Teaching and Learning Collective (TLC) is a grass-roots faculty initiative to improve students' academic achievement by improving their higher-order thinking skills. Last year, the TLC focused on the problem of students’ “limited learning” of complex reasoning, critical thinking and writing skills in colleges across the country as identified by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa in their book, Academically Adrift. In response, during Fall 2012, the TLC welcomed Stanley Fish to discuss solutions to those learning problems.

Drawing on How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One, Fish visited CMU in October 2012 and suggested strategies for developing the analytical skills needed to master new bodies of knowledge and methods of inquiry. These are the basics that prepare a thinker to tackle intellectual challenges in the classroom and beyond. Fish, who “just might be America’s most famous professor” (BookPage), argued that what starts in complexity and confusion will end in exhilaration – for teachers and students alike.

This year’s conference takes up Fish’s challenge to uncover the “values and pleasures of analysis” in a range of courses at CMU.

Sponsors

The 2013 TLC Winter Conference was co-sponsored by the College of Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences (CHSBS) and the Faculty Center for Innovative Teaching (FaCIT.)​